5 Strategies for Surviving a Career Pivot

Hi, I'm Michelle Landry-Klein, fellow Stanford alumni, undergraduate, and MBA. Thank you for joining us for a conversation about managing career pivots. It's a topic relevant to so many people in the workforce. I know that in my career, I've pivoted several times, from entertainment to management consulting, from a venture capital firm to a not-for-profit. My last pivot was about seven years ago, when I helped launch a startup called Business Talent Group. It's also where I met our guest speaker, Jody Greenstone Miller. Jody is the founder and CEO of Business Talent Group. BTG is a marketplace for independent business talent to connect with companies for project-based work. Jody is also a lead thinker on the topic of the future of work, and has frequently written for and been profiled in every major media news outlet. Before she started BTG, she had made a number of career pivots herself. A lawyer by training, she was an investment banker. She was special counsel in the White House. She was COO of AmeriCast, a telco company. And she was a venture partner with Navron Venture Capital. Jody, thank you so much for being here today to share with us some of your ideas about managing career pivots. Before we get into strategies, I'd love for you to give us maybe a more specific definition of what we mean by career pivot. It really means taking a path that looks different than what we would consider a traditional old style career, where you're at one company with a pretty lockstep progression, it's doing things in a different way. It can also mean when you reach a point in your career where you'd like to learn a new skill or learn a new industry and add something new and change your direction. So why is it important that we have this conversation and we're talking about these career pivots now? Why is it happening? Because we're seeing more and more people face this, either by choice or because the market is moving quickly, and it's happening for a number of reasons. People's personal definition of professional success is changing. The world is changing. The pace of technology and globalization means that things are moving faster. We're seeing a difference in the way employers and employees relate to one another, the things that tie them together. And we're seeing a very big difference in the kind of flexibility and control that people want in their professional lives. So this feels very different than the career path of the past. Yes. I mean, there are a lot of differences. First of all, just tenure. The average job tenure today, based on statistics from the Bureau of Labor, is 4.4 years. If you look at the younger generation, we're seeing half of that. So two and a half years at the most. That's very different than careers of the past when people were there 25, 30 years. Second, if you're not at a company a long time, it's very hard to fit into what would be considered the traditional lockstep career path. If you look at a lot of very wonderful companies, they could tell you, here's what you do on day one, here's what you do on 24 months, here's what you do in 36 months. In fact, it was so clear what the path was that recruiters would often be able to look at a resume and tell you, someone was promoted to vice president in 3.6 months. Actually, if they were a star, it would have been 2.8 months. So the precision and definition of what a career looked like was really different than what we're seeing today. And you're also seeing a rise of an independent professional. Recently, Elance, which is an online marketplace for freelancers and the Freelancers Union, came together and showed us that there are 53 million people today, which is a third of the workforce, who self-identify as doing freelancer independent work. These are big demographic changes, and I think you're seeing that drive affect what a career looks like. Has this changed the definition of success? You know, that's a really interesting question. If you look at what success was like in a world where your progression was predefined, it was your title, it was your financial compensation, it was some level of control as you moved up the ladder. But it was really clear what it looked like. Today, people have a much more layered vision of what success looks like. They're looking for different things. They're looking for variety. They're looking for meaning. They're looking for a far greater degree of control over not just their daily life, but the path of their career. And they're also seeing that they can get a lot of the benefits that they would previously look to an employer for in other places. And that's freed up the labor market and allowed people to pursue things that are more personally fulfilling. It feels like there's sort of a new normal out there, that a non-linear career path, as you call it, or these career pivots is more normal. So I guess this would be a good launch time to have the conversation around what strategies have you seen that are effective in managing these career pivots? Do you have some suggestions? I think there are five things that are helpful. First, just to lay them out there, are you need to know what you want. Two, you need to build your knowledge base. Three, you need to leverage your strength. Four, you need to market your skills. And five, you have to avoid some common mistakes. And I think as we go into this world, if you keep these things in mind, you'll be more successful and have a little less stress as you navigate it. because the one thing I would say about career pivots, the path is unique for everybody. And you're not going to be able to look at your business school associate and say, I'm going to do what you did. It's a very personalized way of thinking about your career. The key here is that it's not stagnant. Your life has a cycle. And you go through different periods where different things are happening and you value different things. You need to match up your career objectives with your life cycle, which is something that was not even possible in a world of a traditional career. You did what you did, you were promoted when you were promoted. But you have events in your life. You have marriages, you have children, you have illness, you have hobbies you love. And what you want to do is to take a longer view and look at your life and what you want to accomplish in your life as a whole, and then look at your career. And put them together. And figure out what it is you want in your career at different points in your life. And by the way, just because it looks a certain way on day one, doesn't mean three years later it's going to look the same. It's a constant process. And you want to use different kinds of resources, because this is hard. You want to go to your friends and your colleagues. You want to go to the kind of services that Stanford has. I know they have great- Stanford has actually some excellent services. And I have a good example of a friend that he was a career independent, a management consultant. Very successful career, he loved his work. He, after a few years, a number of years, the work and his lifestyle, which is kind of to your point, he was at a different stage in his life. And it didn't work anymore. So he undertook this path of trying to figure out what it was that he wanted. And it is hard. Because someone say, you know what you want. That's a really hard question to ask yourself. So we actually did turn to Stanford. And Stanford has this great, it's called the Career and Life Visioning Workshop out of the business school. And he did that, and there's a number of self-assessment tools. And from doing, from going through this process, he was able to tease out what it was that he really wanted. And as a result, he actually switched careers into financial management. So I interrupted you there, but- No, but I think, I think the really important point is, this is new. The idea that we have the ability to think about our careers and match it up with our life is something that is impossible in a very traditional, old-style career. So this is a, this is an opportunity. And it's a way in which every individual has now a choice. And you've got to be realistic too. If you say, I want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a high growth venture company, you know, you've got to understand what it means to do those particular jobs, and whether, in fact, you can make it mesh with whatever else you want to do. So it's a hard exercise, but it's the foundation to any career. You have to know where you're trying to go to and what you want. First, you want to understand your gaps. You know, what do you know? What skills do you have? What experiences do you have? And what do you need for where it is you want to go next? And really doing an inventory. And understanding there may be hard skills that you need. You may want to go into financial analysis and you don't know how to do an Excel spreadsheet. So it may be something as simple as that. Or it may be, you know, learning a whole new industry. So there are a lot of resources for that. You can go to conferences, you can read trade publications, you can take classes at MOOCs. I know Stanford's very involved with the offering of online courses. So I think you want to just get your grounding, your knowledge grounded. But then, the harder part is finding the experience, finding the entry point, finding a way to get real life test. First, of whether you even like the way you're going to pivot, because you may not, and to get a way in. Because it's very difficult to make a pivot and have someone immediately, you may get lucky, but have someone immediately say, oh, you're now doing this, and you've never done this before, okay. So. How do you go and get that experience? So I think there are a couple tools you can use. I think one, project work is a great way to go into a new arena. It's great for you, because you get to test it out. And it's great for an employer, because they get to test you out. It's not as big a commitment, and they're much more willing to take a risk. If it's a defined project that they can see how you do. Two, I think pro bono work. I think it is very often possible to find opportunities to make a contribution in a pro bono way that also give you new skills. You know, if you're taking the finance example, you know, you could go into a major non-profit and help them redo their treasury department. You know, they would be grateful, and you would learn a lot, and you would both benefit. I think the third idea that I like is that internships should not just be for people in their 20s. I mean, you know, if you have something you want to learn, and you have something to offer, just like interns have something to offer, you should go and say, I'd like to intern for you. And, you know, really create the opportunity to go in and expand your experience base. I hadn't thought about that. You really think of internship as, you know, several years younger than I am, but that makes a lot of sense if you're trying to build that experience. Do you have any examples of people that have done this well? Well, there's a woman I know who was in investment banking, and who was a consultant, who decided she wanted to get into education. And so, lots of places you can learn about education, a lot written about it, a lot of conferences, a lot of blogs. Got up the learning curve, and in fact, took a pro bono role in an educational institution, which gave her the experience that made her credible to make that pivot. I think this is a really important one, because most professionals have skills of some variety. You've got to break them apart, and understand them, and how you can make them applicable to where you want to go. So, let's take a couple examples. The first is, if you are a functional executive, so you know about human resources, you know the legal department, you know communications, you know finance, you know marketing, if you think about it, even sales. A lot of what organizations have to do are functional skills. Those are very, very transferable. And in fact, the fact that you're coming from a different industry may make you more desirable, because you can bring lessons from one industry to another that can be really helpful. So, if you're in a functional area, you are probably the most well-positioned to make a career pivot. It's easy to transfer those skills. But there are things you might not have thought about that are also really transferable skills. If you have been in startups, and you've helped scale a company from two employees to 20, to 100, to 1,000, that's a very replicable skill, and it's useful to a lot of people. Even industry, you know, you and I were both in entertainment. If we wanted to pivot to technology, which is now a very exciting place to be, how do you use your entertainment experience? Well, you've got a lot of technology companies that need to partner or sell to entertainment companies. You are very valuable to them. So, you can use that industry knowledge to transfer to a different industry. The one great example of that is government. If you look around in government, you'll see cabinet secretaries who have been, you know, cabinet secretary of treasury, and then secretary of state, or head of the office of management and budget, and then secretary of defense. I mean, the government actually has done a really good job, maybe better than the private sector, of recognizing that there's a core set of skills that if a manager has that, can be put into, at the highest levels of, you know, importance in the world, can be transferred. So, it's something to think about and to look at your skill set and see the gold nuggets in it. And pull them out and be able to imagine how you could apply them in a new venue. That actually reminds me of someone that, and I think you're going to know who I'm talking about, that works for their company, who is, she's just a career manager. And she'd had many, many, many years of, you know, high-powered jobs in Fortune 100 companies. But if you looked at what that skill was, it was so transferable, she can just manage her way through anything, right? And the fact that she'd been in, and then she came, you know, to Business Talent Group, but the fact that she'd been in all these different industries, I think gives her perspective that much more, you know, value. And the thing that's really interesting about her is she took a number of years off, I think six or seven. So, a significant amount of time to pursue some personal objectives. When I looked at her, what was clear to me is the skills she had didn't go away. She didn't forget how to manage, she didn't lose that muscle. And that's an important thing to remember too, that, you know, just because you knew a skill and you haven't done it for a while, it's like riding a bike, you don't lose it. And so, don't be afraid. And don't diminish your knowledge because you may have taken a path that, you know, took you on a different place for a couple of years. These are core skills and you should be able to leverage them and use them in your new direction. You also mentioned marketing yourself as a important strategy to have. And I think this is one that some people find daunting, to put yourself out there and say, here's what I do, here are my skills. It can feel awkward. So, do you have any effective strategies that you've seen? Well, today's world, you have to think about online and offline. You have to be present in both. You need to have your elevator pitch, you need to have your LinkedIn resume, you've got to have your bio, which is a shorter resume. You know, you need an array of ways to communicate who you are and what you're looking for. But I think when you're talking about a career pivot, there's a nuance that's important. You need to connect the dots for people. You can't expect them to do it for you. So, if you are looking to make a pivot and your resume is a chronological list of what you've done, which is pretty much the norm, that often won't be enough. Because it's you who's thought through why this makes sense. It's you who's thought through what it is that's relevant from your past to your future. And you need to make that clear. And so, when you are marketing yourself, whether it is in the online channels or the offline channels, or probably most importantly, through your network. So, if you're igniting your network, you don't, you need to help them understand. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here's why I'm trying to do it. Here's why I think I'm credible and compelling to do it. Because those people, the people who know you well and have confidence in you as a professional, are the most valuable people to convince somebody else that you're worth the risk. So, getting those people to understand and spending the time with them. I often get a lot of phone calls from people who used to work for me when they're making pivots. My favorite one was someone who worked for me who told me he was really interested in space. And he had been an entertainment executive. And I thought, okay, that's a hard one. You know, how are we going to take the entertainment in space? Okay, we can do that. But, you know, it's important. Because after spending time with him, I actually was able to help him. Connect the dots. And how do you make the argument that this skill set is relevant to what you want to do? So, it's marketing, but it's smart marketing. And it's marketing where you have to do a little more of the heavy lifting than you would typically do if your whole career was in marketing. Right. And you went up the curve the way, you know, many people have done and will continue to do. And then you want to go into another marketing job. It's pretty easy. Right. This is a difference between them. I think we've gone through about four strategies and things to do. But I was intrigued by something you said, which was to know how to avoid common mistakes. What do you see as common mistakes that people make in career transitions? So, I mean, the first is, we talked about it, be realistic. I mean, A, this is not easy. B, it can take time. You may fail. You may go down a path that doesn't work, so you have to regroup. But you've got to know that you're going to make it. It's going to be okay, but you've got to be realistic about it. And, you know, very closely connected is be patient because it can take time. That's a hard one sometimes. You know, lightning could strike, and it does, but more likely, you're going to have to navigate this and figure it out and give yourself enough time and enough space to do it. And that's why, you know, project work is actually an interesting way to keep yourself busy as you go through this because oftentimes, that can turn into something that you don't expect. Right, right. Well, and also, it seems like there's a phrase that you've used several times that I've always liked, which is embrace the serendipity, is that opportunities may come up. You may not be ready for them or even want them, or you may not think you want them, but you really should embrace them. And, you know, there's sort of three things that are connected, you know. A, you've got to be realistic. You've got to be patient. But you've also got to pull up your sleeves. You may have to take a step back. You may have to do things that feel uncomfortable. But again, you're trying to forge a way into something new. And so, like anything new, you know, it's going to feel a little uncomfortable. You're going to have to do something. Also, we always talk about the importance of teamwork, which is, of course, important. When you're pivoting, you have to think of yourself as a new worker, a new employee, and you want to figure out how you can make an individual impact. You want to show that you can make a contribution, and you want to make it in a way that lets people understand this is going to work. And be the team player, but also be very clear on what you're bringing to personal value. And then, the serendipity is just... It's just something you've always said that I like. You know, it's actually, as I said, the career that is pivoting is going to be unique to everybody. And so, one of the reasons that you want to be fluid and opportunistic is, you know, I look at my own career. I could never have written down law to investment banking to government to, you know, media to venture capital. You know, you would never have seen that. It's a combination of following what you're interested in, but being nimble. And when the opportunity comes up... So, media is a really good example. And this is kind of another thing for career pivot that I think people should just keep in mind. I got an opportunity to go into media precisely because I knew nothing about it. And it was a situation where there had been an attempt to create a new market, and the people who knew a lot about that market were very rigid in their thinking. And they said, I know how to do this. And, of course, it's a new market. So, sometimes knowledge can be an obstacle, not a plus. So, they... So, they were glad you were clueless. They were glad I didn't know anything. And so, again, you know, that's being nimble. Like, I didn't expect that I could walk into an opportunity in media because I knew nothing about media. I had no media in my background. I got lucky, found something that was. So, I think it's just keeping your eyes open, being receptive to things that you hadn't thought of, but that might work. And trying them. And the other thing you said, which I don't want to, you know, skip over, is the get your hands dirty. Like, you may, if you're making a career transition or a pivot, you may have to do something that you may think was below you or that your skills were beyond. Exactly. But you do it. You do it because you know where you're going. And, you know, the thing that's interesting about this whole area is we're talking a lot about what an individual needs to do to be successful in a career pivot. Employers now have to think more broadly about people's career and how to evaluate that, because it's not going to look like it's always looked. And so, the ability to understand that people are pursuing different things at different times, and to be able to assess and evaluate the quality of that individual, even though it's a lot harder than it used to be when you said, okay, they advanced up in 2.6 months. And so, I think it's a new skill for employers, too, to be aware that this is happening at the rate that it's happening, and to adjust their own expectations and skills, honestly, in order to recognize the great talent that's out there that is pursuing a different path. It really does feel like a new norm. I think we're going to see more and more people who both, again, by choice or by happenstance, are finding themselves looking to make a career pivot, and I think they should feel excited about that opportunity, and excited about where it might take them. That's such an important topic for individuals, as well as for, as you said, companies that need to access this talent. Jodi, thank you. This has been a very helpful conversation, and I appreciate you being here. I also want to thank the Stanford Alumni Association, the Graduate School of Business, and the Business Talent Group for hosting this session today. And want to remind all Stanford alumni that there are numerous career services and tools available on multiple sites, but at Stanford Alumni Services, as well as the GSB Alumni Career Services, there's a number of tools that you can access for all of your lifelong career transition needs. Thank you very much.